Northern Ireland’s new First Minister-elect Michelle O’Neill was brought up in one of the most notorious battlegrounds of the Troubles.
And the family of the deputy leader of Sinn Fein were deeply involved in the clashes in East Tyrone.
Her cousin, Tony Doris, was one of three IRA men killed in an SAS ambush in 1991, when O’Neill was 14.
The terrorists were on their way to attack an off-duty soldier in the Ulster Defence Regiment when they were intercepted. It is suspected a double agent within the IRA had tipped off the security services.
Doris, 21, and his accomplices were burned beyond recognition after their car burst into flames as it crossed from Londonderry into Tyrone at Croagh.
The coffin of Northern Ireland's former deputy first minister and ex-IRA commander Martin McGuinness is carried to his home in Londonderry by Gerry Adams, Raymond McCartney and Michelle O'Neill
Another cousin, Gareth Doris, was involved in a high explosives attack on the police base at Coalisland in 1997 only a year before the Good Friday Agreement which was to bring peace was signed.
Again, anti-terrorist officers were waiting, and unleashed a hail of bullets. Doris survived the attack after surgery.
He was sentenced to ten years in jail but, because of the Good Friday Agreement, he was released in less than three.
Mrs O’Neill’s father, too, was an IRA member. Quite what his role was remains unclear, but he was interned at the Maze Prison at the height of the Troubles, and spent time in other jails, including Crumlin Road in Belfast, Armagh and Magilligan.
All of which tends to undermine the modern image the glamorous mother-of-two, with her carefully dyed hair and painted nails, seeks to portray.
She was meant to represent a break from the leadership of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, key architects of the republican campaign for decades.
The 45-year-old, born in County Cork shortly after the height of the Troubles, has served as deputy First Minister under the DUP’s Arlene Foster (above) and Paul Givan since 2020
